“Rope!”
a husky voice shouts in warning. Somewhere in the obsidian night
sky overhead a nylon rope is invisibly whizzing through the air
toward us. Coils of rope hit the ground with a soft thud. Like a
cowboy bulldogging a steer, an agile monk grabs it and in twenty
seconds cinches down a row of ten bee hives on the flatbed of a
two-ton truck. He loops the rope and deftly sends it whistling over
the next row of hives to the other side of truck, shouting “rope.”
It’s a necessary warninggetting hit by the rope’s butt end is like
being on the wrong side of Indiana Jones’ bullwhip. It hurts far
worse than a bee sting.

With
disoriented bees crawling on the lenses of flashlights, casting
giant insectile shadows, several teams of Hindu monks are carrying
150-pound bee hivestheir entrances sealedto the truck.
Inside each hive about 60-90,000 bees and their single queen/mother
are jostled and angry. Normally gentle, they are very defensive
at night and we are moving them to a far distant location, the equivalent
of picking up your entire house with all your relatives at the breakfast
table and moving it to another state. Kauai, northernmost of the
Hawaiian islands, is home to a major monastery that runs a unique
endowment: a commercial-scale bee outfit of 3,000 hives. It’s the
second largest in Hawaii and one of the top twenty in the US.

We’re
high on a mountain plateauour two trucks straining under a
hundred hives covered by bright orange netting material. The view
shoots straight out to an endless ocean glowing silver and magenta
from early dawn light. Our crew of eight monks, each buried under
two bee suits with gloves taped to the sleeves, are thirstily slaking
down cool water. The daily consumption of water is one gallon per
person. We’ve been up since 2:15 in the morning, a good hour and
a half before the monastery’s other resident monks rustle from sleep
for pre-dawn meditation. Today, fourteen hours of work lie ahead.
In the night blackness, gear is secured, the trucks are checked
like a jet aircraft, lunches packed, water stowed. We drive down
an empty highway, drinking coffee from thermoses, music on the tape
deck, headed to the desert-like side of Kauai. Night moves are tough
on monks and bees alike, but it’s the only way to make sure that
the thousands of “field” beesthe ones that harvest honey nectarare
in the hive. As they navigate by the infrared light of the sun,
when the last purple/greys of sunset come they are winging their
way back to the hive at 25 m.p.h. And with a million antsy bees
as our cargo, the dawn journey through the island’s towns ensures
empty streets and unalarmed people.

From
our mountain perch we savor the ocean view before clambering into
the trucks for the careful haul to the wet side of the island.
We’re looking northwestward in the general direction of Japan.
There, in Tokyo, two of our brother monks are talking with men
who are pulling together a financial package to purchase the monastery’s
apiary (bee farm). The effort is coordinated by an eclectic entrepreneur,
Indy “Rishidas” Schneider, who is fluent in Japanese and Japan’s
complex business culture. The purchase involves 250 million bees
in 3,000 hives scattered throughout Kauai’s offroad terrain in
sixty “bee yards.” The hives are capable of producing 450,000
pounds of honey each year, enough to fill a hotel-size swimming
pool. With the papers signed in June, Rishidas moved to Kauai
to take over as the apiary’s manager.

The
monastery’s abbot first visited Hawaii in 1959. Like Mark Twain,
he was instantly enamored of the islands’ verdant, volcanic beauty
and thick etherealness. On the abbot’s second visit to Kauai in
late 1969,—through a lucky opportunity—he was able to buy a rock-and-timber
resort, a refuge of the 1950’s well-to-do that had fallen on hard
times. It was nestled on a small river in the foothill wrinkles
of Kauai’s mile-high volcano, Mt. Waialeale. In February, 1970,
he brought over a staff of senior monks and volunteers and reincarnated
“The Tropical Inn,” as it was quaintly named, into a secluded
monastery burrowed in eucalyptus trees, palms and ferns.

In
the monastery’s first two years, the closest any of the monks
got to a bee was when they stepped on one while walking through
the grass to the swimming pool or temple. But bees were in reality
zinging their way in flight paths constantly through the monastery
airspace. In summer they would raid the Octopus tree, filling
the air with a loud and comforting humming sound. In early fall,
the eucalyptus trees’ white puff-ball flowers became little space
stations for tens of thousands of orbiting bees. Kauai is known
as the “Garden Island,” and the “garden” was teeming with nature’s
greatest pollinators.

One
day in late summer of 1972, the abbot unexpectedly announced to
the monastery that we were to learn beekeeping. Beekeeping is
a skill/an practiced by contemplatives since the days of dynastic
Egypt. Aristotle was an avid beekeeper. The monks were laboring
long hours in carpentry, overseeing a far-flung publishing enterprise
and administrating the Church and its educational institutions.
Goats and cows were kept and a garden established, but beekeeping
was a real monkish hobby.

So
as hundreds of inepts who aspire to beekeeping do every summer,
a couple of monks sat down at a table and rifled through a Sears
& Roebuck catalogue for bee suits, helmets, veils, smokers (canisters
in which to burn smoke-producing fuel) and the wooden hive bodies.
We located some beekeeping books. The white suits and shiny, metal
smokers and pine-smelling boxes arrived. We knew from pictures in
the books the difference between the queenbuilt like a missile
with wings, capable of laying 2,000 eggs a dayand the female
workers who do all the work and comprise the colony’s huge population,
and the male drones who are lazy, honey-consuming burns whose sole
function is to mate with the virgin queen while in flight, an acrobatic
act that requires stupendous vision. The drones are endowed with
huge eyes stuck on a fuzzy W.C. Fields body. The poor guys die after
the mating and when the winter season onsets, they’re ruthlessly
booted out of the hive. We always felt sympathy for the drones.

All
we needed now was bees. You can order package bees and a queen
to start a hive from suppliers. But we knew that Kauai in the
early 1900’s had supported a beekeeping operation of 2,000 colonies.
When it faded away, those colonies had gone wild. Estimates stated
that Kauai now had 5,000 wild colonies. The abbot told the monks,
“All you have to do is go out and catch a couple of those wild
colonies.”

To
track down a wild hive, you have to follow the flight path of
its harvesting bees, a continuous two-directional flying route
that can cover up to five miles distance from the hive. You also
have to drag along a box with frames to put the captured bees,
queen and brood/honey comb in. The monks, sweating rivers inside
their suits on a sopping hot day, successfully scouted a bee flight
corridor and took off into the scrub thickets like a herd of elephants,
splashing through streams, falling on their faces, trying to keep
the silvery wings of the bees within sight. At the day’s end they
returned triumphant, exhausted, stung badly by their first real
encounter with wild bees, but grinning through swollen cheeks
with pride. Pictures were taken. The thick, dark honey was sampled.
Everybody excitedly watched hundreds of bees coming out to the
entrance porch of the hive body, sticking their tails in the air
and rapidly fanning their wings. It created a noticeable breeze
and delicious sound. It was like tapping into the secret code
of nature. We would learn later that the bees dispersed a chemical
scent during the fanning that indicated this was their new home.
This first encounter with live bees was such a delight that we
ordered an extra-large size bee suit for our 6’3” abbot. In the
Upanishads, there is recorded a delightful passage known as the
“Honey Doctrine,” which describes stages of yogic awareness in
terms of honey-like sweetness. Bees have been the silent teachers
of many philosophers.

Within
several years, the monastery staff had matured from bungling bee-haversthose
who have a couple of coloniesto knowledgeable beekeepers who
could tend large numbers of hives, including mastering the art of
splitting a single hive into two or more, dealing with deadly bee
diseases that could swiftly wipe out the entire apiary, fighting
off bufo toads that were eating horrifying numbers of bees, building
and repairing equipment and tuning into Kauai’s shifting flower
seasons. The colony count was vastly increased through splitting
and buying other beekeeper’s hives. “Bee yards,” where 20-80 hives
are arranged in a horse-shoe shape for truck access, were located
in outlying pastures, woods and desert dunes far from the monastery.

Beekeeping,
for the monks, was more than learning the basics of equipment
and bee society. It was a test in dealing with fear and a challenge
to learn how to project a friendly aura and gracefully move around
the bee colony. In our first ten years of beekeeping, the bees
predominately came from DNA stock that was very defensive. This
can create a mean, aggressive hive. In inspecting, harvesting
or splitting a hive, the beekeeper is working down into its densest
population area. Smoke, which signals fire to the bees, pacifies
them as they suck up honey in case the colony has to abandon the
hive. But despite liberal belching of smoke, mean hives explode
like a grenade when manipulated and within two seconds the novice
monk beekeeper is enveloped by thousands of bees trying to sting
him and exuding a banana-smelling chemical scent that signals
“attack.” Whole yards can be churned into giant clouds of attacking
bees if there are enough mean hives that are mishandled or even
if dark clouds roll in blotting out the sun. The smart bees go
for places on the suit where the fabric is wet or creased close
to the skin. They crawl into the veil that protects the face and
madly try to enter air holes in the sun helmets.

It
takes tremendous presence of mind not to panic and rip off the veil
which some monks didor to start swiping at the bees which
just makes them madder. In some of our worst cases, even experienced
beekeeper monks sustained over 150 stings and would start reeling
and seeing purple skies. Gradually, the monk conquered the fear
and could fuse his mind with each hive handled, treating it like
a supernatural being. A kind aura and thoughts were projected and
graceful, non-jerky movements were mastered that blended into the
natural motion of the bees themselves. The monk and hive became
one. Its incredibly beautiful inner workings became obvious: the
bee dance which instructs other foraging bees exactly where to go
for the best flower sources; the queen laying eggs while her “court”
of bee-maidens cleaned and fed her; the hatching of powdery baby
bees who have no inkling what’s going on in this city of 200,000
bees.

Besides
the monk’s skill in handling a colony, the monastery beekeepers
put great time and effort into improving the genetics of the operation,
a painstaking process done solely through the queen mother to produce
a gentle but productive hive. We were largely successful in this
and were able to work millions of bees a day in short sleeve shirtsrarely
getting stung. By 1979, the bee operation had been officially established
as an endowment for the monastery, the traditional agricultural
means of ensuring a Hindu monastery’s maintenance into the future.

By
1985, the monastery had split and acquired 2,000 hives and was
operating a huge honey-extracting plant with stainless steel processing
equipment, forklifts and mountains of bee hive boxes. Tons of
butter-rich honey were going off-island to Hawaii’s commercial
bakers. By 1987, the apiary had swollen to 3,000 hives, an incredibly
rapid build-up. In fact, in sixteen years the monks had succeeded
in resuscitating the near-dead bee business on Kauai (which had
fallen to 300 colonies) and pumped it up to a new level in both
quantity and professional quality. A lab analysis showed Kauai’s
special blends of honey as remarkably mineral dense.